I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World

by James Geary

  After the interview, each person creates a collage of his or her selected imagery with the help of another ZMET staffer. The starting point is a single central image that most strongly represents that person’s feelings about the product or service in question. The ZMET staffer then blends in the other pictures under the subject’s supervision, gradually working toward a composite depiction of his or her overall attitudes and associations.

  The collages and interview transcripts are then analyzed to extract common themes. The result: a dozen product-related Rorschach blots and actively imagined Jungian embellishments.

  After conducting more than 12,000 ZMET sessions for more than one hundred clients in over thirty countries, Zaltman has identified seven recurring motifs that, like Jungian archetypes, bubble up again and again from the depths of the consumer unconscious—balance, connection, container, control, journey, resource, and transformation. These, according to Zaltman, are the guiding metaphors of the marketplace.

  In Zaltman’s taxonomy, the deep metaphor128 of balance refers to social and psychological equilibrium, expressed in phrases like “I am centered” and “It feels slightly off.” Connection involves the sense of belonging (“a team player” or “a loose cannon”). Container describes psychological or emotional states (“in a good mood” or “out of your mind”). Control implies mastery of events (“It’s out of my hands” or “We’re on the same page”). Journey suggests movement toward or away from a goal (“We’re on course” or “We got waylaid”). Resource references basic necessities such as food, family, friends, and finances (“bread and butter issues” and “My job is my lifeline”). Transformation encompasses physical or psychological change (“He turned over a new leaf” or “She’s a different person now”).

  Jung theorized that a small set of basic archetypal patterns generates all our psychological and emotional complexity, usually without our conscious knowledge. Indeed, Jung wrote, “Those people who are least aware of their unconscious side129 are the most influenced by it.” Zaltman theorizes much the same thing about the influence of metaphor on consumer behavior.

  Some market research supports this thesis. StrategyOne, a marketing consultancy, polled about a thousand Americans, trawling for their deep metaphors about life. People often use metaphors to describe their lives, the StrategyOne survey stated, before going on to ask: “Which one of the following do you think best describes your life?”

  Respondents could choose from about a half dozen metaphors, such as “life is a journey130,” “life is a battle” and “life is a play.” Most people, 51 percent, chose the “life is a journey” metaphor. Eleven percent felt life was a battle; 8 percent said life was a novel; 6 percent said it was a race; and 4 percent were sure it was a carousel. The pollsters found few differences when the results were grouped by age, gender, or region. The only real disparity: those with annual incomes lower than $35,000 were three times more likely to describe life as a battle than those who earned more.

  “Deep metaphors are131 enduring ways of perceiving things,” Zaltman writes in Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal about the Minds of Consumers, “making sense of what we encounter, and guiding our subsequent actions.” By understanding the affective associations that structure customers’ thinking, Zaltman suggests marketers can use these metaphors as selling tools in product design, shopping environments, and advertising campaigns. Deep metaphors are, for Zaltman, the ultimate hidden persuaders.

  To explore my own deep metaphors, I had a private ZMET session with Richard Smith, associate director of the marketing consultancy firm Business Development Research Consultants (BDRC) in London, which uses the ZMET in its work.

  When I did my interview, the Great Recession of 2008–2009 was in full swing. Some of the world’s biggest banks teetered on the verge of collapse; pundits routinely proclaimed (using object metaphors, naturally) that the economy was falling off a cliff; the value of homes, investments, and pensions (including my own) was evaporating faster than spit on a griddle. So I chose the financial services industry as the focus of my session.

  I spent the week before the meeting collecting images. My central figure was the poster from Man on Wire, the 2008 documentary about Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the tops of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in 1974. The promotional image was a close-up of Petit’s foot on the tightrope, with a dizzying view of the vertiginous 1,300-foot drop to the streets of New York.

  My other imagery included photos of a man standing on a melting ice floe and a man standing beside his car, which was submerged up to its wheel wells in river water. Both images represented my feeling that the recession was a kind of natural disaster, on the scale of the climate crisis, that affected the whole planet.

  I also brought along an image of a volatile stock price chart (a financial EEG displaying the world economy’s not-very-vital signs), a dollar bill consumed by flames (an almost literal depiction of what was happening to my kids’ college funds), and an agonized, ecstatic marathon runner reaching the finish line (my hoped for goal: financial security).

  My ZMET collage of the financial services industry, circa 2008–2009. Image by Noleen Robinson; courtesy of Business Development Research Consultants, London.

  Smith, a genial man with the reassuring air of a family physician, ushered me into BDRC’s magnificently nondescript conference room. He explained the process and asked if I had brought the images. I spread the pictures out on the table one by one, and Smith started asking me questions.

  “What does it feel like to be on the wire?”

  “It scares me shitless,” I admitted. (The “scared shitless” metaphor derives from the physiological fact that animals in stressful situations—an antelope pursued by a lion, for example—involuntarily defecate to shed excess weight, thus speeding their flight.)

  “Where are you going?”

  I was walking from one safe place to another, but the only way to get there was along this perilous path across an abyss. My present position was about in the middle of the tightrope, halfway between the relative security of early adulthood (a time of few financial responsibilities and no kids) and late middle age (a time of paid-off mortgages and empty nests).

  I was midway through this journey, with two decades of school fees ahead of me and the industries by which I earned my living (journalism and publishing) seemingly headed toward extinction. I was completely exposed. One false step and I was finished.

  “What does the picture mean for you on a practical level?”

  The shift from figurative to fact unsettled me. Suddenly, the man on the wire felt all too real. I realized the images I had been nonchalantly tearing out of magazines and printing from the Web for the past week revealed a lot about me.

  Like a lot of people, I was genuinely terrified by what was happening to the economy. Having already experienced job loss once, I was scared that I would lose my sources of income again, that I would not be able to pay my kids’ tuition, that our home would be at risk. Along with these primal fears came memories of my parents’ money habits—my mother’s caution and frugality, my father’s breezy Micawberian confidence—and the fragility of their finances in later life. I was anxious that at any moment the financial rug could be pulled out from under me, that I would fall, and in falling fail my family.

  I hadn’t expected my financial free associations to dredge up quite such troubling issues. After my session ended, I felt worried—and very wobbly.

  My collage clearly tapped into at least three of Zaltman’s deep metaphors—balance, control, and journey—and I had no trouble thinking of formative commercial messages from my childhood that played off these associations.

  Allstate’s classic tagline “You’re in good hands with Allstate,” accompanied by the picture of a lovely suburban home carefully cupped in a pair of strong hands, is all about control and security. Prudential’s “Get a piece of the rock,” and the accompanying image of a Gibraltar-like promontory, is roo
ted in ideas of balance and stability. The fact that both of these ads have stuck in my mind since the 1970s testifies to the fact that they hit a deep archetypal target.

  Certain archetypal marketing images are used so often that they become visual clichés. Acorns are symbols of long-term growth; clocks are symbols of regularity and reliability; hearts are symbols of love and affection. Everything from chocolates to automobiles to beer132 has been advertised as nestled in an oyster shell, playing off the ancient metaphor of a pearl signifying anything of great price.

  One study even found that people are more likely to respond to symbols that have once been widely known133—even if they are not consciously familiar with that particular symbol and the symbol itself originated in an unfamiliar culture. Researchers created two sets of twenty images: one consisting of actual symbols from a variety of cultures (flags, trademarks, emblems) that were once popular but are now forgotten, and one consisting of variations on those symbols created especially for the experiment. In fifteen of the twenty cases, participants selected the original symbol as more familiar and appealing. These kinds of tired images persist and are revivified “because they contain an essential truth134 that appeals to our collective sense of myth and form,” graphic designers Philip Thompson and Peter Davenport wrote in The Dictionary of Visual Language. In other words, they tap into deep metaphors.

  If I had been part of an actual ZMET study, Smith would have collated my comments with a dozen or so other interviews and compared my collage with a dozen or so other collages. Transcripts of each interview would have been fed into a software program that extracts all the associations made by at least four people. These associations would have been compiled into a “consensus map” representing a snapshot of consumer attitudes toward the financial services industry. The consensus map would then be used to plot a marketing campaign or a new product launch.

  One ZMET study, conducted for a major agricultural corporation135, prompted a complete rethinking of advertising strategy. Ads for crop seeds typically stress things like disease resistance and higher yields. But in their ZMET sessions, farmers brought in highly emotive pictures and talked about farming as a multigenerational journey, a vocation inherited from their parents that they hoped to pass on to their own children.

  As a result, the seed firm shifted its message from functional to familial. One print ad depicted a farmer and his father out in the fields studying a soil sample. The tagline: “Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Neither. The Farmer.” By cultivating a paternal rather than a practical image, the company hoped it could grow sales.

  For many mass-market goods, there are few profound or even discernible differences between an individual product and its competitors. One kind of cereal, deodorant, or running shoe is pretty much like every other kind. Product differentiation—the Holy Grail of “iconic” brand status—therefore involves creating unique Smoke-like associations. Advertisers don’t promote breakfast cereal; they promote the “breakfast experience.” To stand out from the crowd, companies sell the metaphor as much as the merchandise.

  Sometimes, the merchandise itself embodies metaphor. Philips’s Senseo coffeemaker136, for instance, is designed as a sleek, black arc that conjures up the image of a bow-tied waiter bending over a café table to set down a steaming cup of fresh espresso. The Hourglass coffeemaker is designed in the shape of, well, an hourglass. The Hourglass doesn’t use heat or electricity to brew coffee, a process that results in less acidity but takes about twelve hours. Users start making coffee before they go to bed, and it’s ready by the time they wake up in the morning. The coffeemaker’s hourglass shape is a visual reminder that all good things—or at least, a good cup of coffee—come to those who wait.

  In her classic Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising, Judith Williamson dissected the way ads construct affective associations. An avid reader of both Karl Marx and glossy women’s magazines, Williamson would make the perfect ZMET subject. Her interest in advertising began as a result of her habit of tearing out ads from publications such as Vogue in order to study their effect on her. That effect, she concluded, is achieved through affect, the transference of human qualities and characteristics to consumer products.

  In any advertisement, Williamson argues, there are always two meanings at work: the product itself and its host of semi-unconscious associations. Advertising works through metaphor—by transferring meanings back and forth. Ads, Williamson writes, “provide a structure137 which is capable of transforming the language of objects to that of people, and vice versa . . . Once the connection has been made, we begin to translate the other way and in fact to skip translating altogether: taking the sign for what it signifies, the thing for the feeling.”

  Thus, a breakfast cereal is not a breakfast cereal, but an aspect of domestic bliss. A seed is not a seed, but the bearer of a family’s farming legacy. An insurance company is not an insurance company, but a rock of stability in turbulent times. An ad is a metaphor in which the product is the target and a set of affects—imagery, associations, archetypes—is the source.

  The BDRC’s Smith compares interpreting a ZMET study to interpreting a poem: the art lies not in understanding what the words literally describe but what they emotionally realize. Williamson, too, links advertising with poetry, invoking the idea of the “objective correlative” as an explanation for the way ads achieve iconic status in our minds.

  T. S. Eliot defined the objective correlative138 in his essay “Hamlet and His Problems”:

  The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked . . . The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion.

  Williamson suggests that ads create objective correlatives139 for mass consumption. A product becomes linked to a highly emotional state—the desire for everything from status, sex, and wealth to intimacy, community, and security—through powerful affective associations and archetypes. Once these connections are made, “ ‘Objective correlatives’ end up by being . . . the very indefinable qualities they were used to invoke,” Williamson writes.

  Thus, a deodorant does not just mask odors but confers a whiff of sexual potency; a car does not just convey you from one place to another but endows you with prestige and power. The effect of affective associations like these is subtle yet far-reaching, with impacts that are felt well beyond the specific products advertised.

  McDonald’s “golden arches,” the Coca-Cola logo, and Colonel Sanders, the face of KFC, are among the most instantly recognizable symbols in the world. And ads for these types of products, which routinely depict fast food as fun, are very effective. One study on the impact of television advertising on food consumption found that children consumed 45 percent more snacks when exposed to ads140 for high-calorie, low-nutrient foods. Moreover, the ads increased consumption of all kinds of food, not just the kind featured in the commercials, regardless of whether participants reported being hungry or not. The researchers also concluded that ads depicting food as exciting and upbeat—can I interest you in a McDonald’s “happy meal”?—prompted the most snacking. Ads such as these clearly access Zaltman’s “connection” and “resource” metaphors.

  But ads influence more than just what we eat. Another study, this one on the subliminal influence of fast-food logos, found that exposure to the corporate imagery of major fast-food chains increased people’s feelings of impatience and reduced their willingness to save money141.

  Researchers subliminally exposed participants to either McDonald’s and KFC logos or the logos of two diners offering similar food at similar prices. Those who saw the fast-food logos completed a reading task faster than those who saw the diner logos, even though there was no time limit
set for the task. The fast-food group was also much more likely to accept an immediate but small cash payment rather than a larger sum in a week’s time, suggesting they were less able to delay gratification, even though by doing so they would end up with more money.

  The research team concluded that exposure to fast-food logos not only made people eat more but also made them engage in more behaviors associated with fast food: impatience, hurry, and a desire for immediate gratification. In these experiments, participants took the signs for the qualities signified.

  In her poem “Poetry142,” Marianne Moore insisted that poets should be “literalists of the imagination,” presenting “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Ad makers are accomplished imaginative literalists, too, supplying the ultimate objective correlatives: real objects that evoke and satisfy our deepest emotions—by encouraging us to spend money.

  I was on the verge of buying that extended warranty for my digital camera until I thought, “Wait a minute, do I really need this?” The idea that something could go wrong made me feel vulnerable. But I didn’t know anyone who had ever had problems with a digital camera. In fact, the devices seemed amazingly sturdy. And even in the unlikely event that the camera did break down, was it really worth $20—10 percent of the purchase price—to make sure I got a new one? The chances of that happening seemed slim. So I decided to forgo the reassurance of an extended warranty. The camera works like a charm.

  Decoding the objective correlatives in advertisements and sales pitches doesn’t defuse them. Rather, recognizing the deep metaphors in commercial messages enables us to insert a moment of conscious choice into our purchasing decisions. Do I want to buy this product? If so, am I buying it because I need it or want it or because it has tapped into some powerful, though possibly completely irrelevant, affective associations?